Alfred Russel Wallace: A very rare specimen

A hundred years after his death, it is high time to put this evolutionary pioneer in his proper place – as Charles Darwin’s equal, argues Stephanie Pain

YESTERDAY I met someone who had never heard of Alfred Russel Wallace. They were as amazed by my enthusiasm for a long-dead collector of beetles, butterflies and birds as I was by their admission that, really, they had no idea who he was.

What made the hole in my otherwise well-informed friend’s knowledge even more surprising was that this year, the centenary of Wallace’s death, has seen an outbreak of what could almost be called Wallacemania. Reprints of his books have been published, there are conferences and websites galore, and there is even at long last a statue at the Natural History Museum in London.

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Exotic beetles were among Wallace’s passions as a collector of new species(Image&colon; Nils Jorgensen/REX)

My admiration, and that of so many biologists, ecologists and natural history enthusiasts, is easy to explain. Wallace was a self-taught naturalist, who despite lacking the usual advantages of the Victorian gentleman scientist became one of the most revered men of his age. He had little formal education, no family wealth to draw on and no friends in high scientific places. But he did have passion, perception, and the resourcefulness and resilience to survive 12 years in the remote and dangerous tropics.

In 1848, Wallace headed to the Amazon with entomologist Henry Bates. Their plan was to collect specimens and attempt to answer the big question of the day&colon; how do species arise? Practically penniless, the pair funded their travels by selling specimens to collectors back in England.

After four years, Wallace left for home, only to be shipwrecked and lose almost everything he had worked for. Undeterred, two years later he sailed for the Malay Archipelago, islands stretching from Malaysia to New Guinea. In eight years of island hopping, he travelled some 22,000 kilometres and collected over 125,000 specimens, including more than 5000 new species.

Delicate arrangement

The fact that Wallace isn’t a household name is harder to explain. In 1858, he prompted one of the most famous and controversial events in the history of science&colon; the hurriedly arranged reading of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection at the Linnean Society of London. During his travels, Wallace had independently reached the same conclusions as Darwin, and in March 1858, he sent Darwin a paper explaining his thinking. In it he wrote&colon; “The life of wild animals is a struggle for existence and the weakest and least perfectly organised must always succumb…”

Darwin, who had been developing his theory for almost 20 years, was distraught, yet he resigned himself to being scooped by his younger correspondent. Darwin’s eminent friends, geologist Charles Lyell and botanist Joseph Hooker, had other ideas. They cooked up a “delicate arrangement” to ensure both men received credit for the idea. Unknown to Wallace and despite Darwin’s misgivings, Lyell and Hooker presented Wallace’s paper alongside some of Darwin’s earlier notes outlining his theory.

The arrangement was as dodgy then as it would be now, but in the event it suited Darwin and Wallace. Darwin got the recognition he fully deserved and Wallace earned his entrée to the scientific establishment. When Wallace eventually learned what had happened, far away in Indonesia, he wrote to Hooker to thank him “for the course you have adopted, which while strictly just to both parties is so favourable to myself”.

Wallace was still in the Malay Archipelago in 1859 when Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Returning home three years later, Wallace turned his attention to another great puzzle – why are species distributed the way they are? What part does geography play in the evolution of species?

In the Amazon, he had found slightly different species on opposite sides of the river. In the archipelago, he found islands with their own unique species. Most famously, when he crossed the narrow but deep channel between the islands of Bali and Lombok, he discovered strikingly different sorts of birds and other animals. He realised he had crossed a boundary between two major zoological realms&colon; on one side, the animals were typical of Asia, on the other of Australasia. The boundary is known as Wallace’s Line.

“Wallace was so much more than Darwin’s sidekick or a footnote in the story of evolution”

Wallace wasn’t just a great field biologist and brilliant thinker, he was a prolific and successful writer, which was just as well for a man who needed to earn to eat. The Malay Archipelago, published in 1869, is one of the most vivid travel memoirs ever written and has never been out of print.

For more intimate glimpses of Wallace the man, there are his letters. Over the past two years, the Natural History Museum has located and digitised some 3800 letters from and to Wallace. Spanning almost 70 years, the letters reveal his many interests outside natural science, from socialism and spiritualism to land reform and gardening.

A selection of letters covering the archipelago years have also been published for the first time by Oxford University Press in Alfred Russel Wallace&colon; Letters from the Malay Archipelago. Wallace wrote as often as his travels allowed to family and friends, fellow naturalists and to his agent who sold his specimens.

The archipelago letters include key correspondence with Darwin and Hooker. But there are also lively accounts of people and places, politics and potentates, not to mention a poignant tale of life with an orphaned orang-utan, detailed instructions to his sister on choosing him a new assistant, and a letter thanking his mother for sending bacon (“turned out more eatable than I expected”).

Wallace’s field notebooks are now available to view online too, thanks to the Linnean Society. The most significant, the “species notebook” covering 1855 to 1859, is also at the heart of an important new book published by Harvard University Press. On the Organic Law of Change is a facsimile of the notebook with transcriptions and annotations by evolutionary biologist James Costa.

The notebook itself is part diary, part field notes and part log of each day’s collecting. Its pages are filled with observations, beautiful drawings and daily tallies of specimens. But this is also where Wallace wrote his thoughts, analysed papers and developed his evolutionary ideas. Reading between the lines, Costa suspects that if Wallace had ever written his version of On the Origin of Species, he might have called it On the Organic Law of Change.

So what was Wallace doing when that momentous meeting was taking place at the Linnean Society? As soon as Wallace had sent his paper to Darwin he set off for New Guinea, “the land of the cassowary and tree kangaroo”. He was full of enthusiasm, longing to find birds of paradise, “the most extraordinary and the most beautiful of the feathered inhabitants of the earth”.

In New Guinea, Wallace found peril rather than birds of paradise(Image&colon; BlueGreen Pictures/SuperStock)

By 18 June, when his letter reached Darwin, he was desperate to leave. New Guinea was unhealthy, dangerous and disappointing. He was alternately starving or sick. Ants ate his specimens. And he failed to find the birds of paradise he sought. “Wet all day – nothing – still unwell,” his log records. By 1 July, when his paper was read, things were even worse. One of his assistants had just died from dysentery, and Wallace was suffering the after-effects of yet another fever. Oblivious to events in London, instead of jotting “fame at last”, all he had to say was “short walk – unwell”.

This week, Wallace celebrations reach their peak. There have been international symposiums, exhibitions and press coverage any living scientist would envy. The Natural History Museum’s Wallace100 website is packed with images, letters and blogs. Then there is the statue. If this doesn’t restore Wallace’s fame to something approaching the level he enjoyed in his lifetime, it won’t be for want of trying.

This article appeared in print under the headline “A very rare specimen”